Computing Dictionary
C shell definition
operating system (csh) The
Unix command-line interpreter shell and
script language by
William Joy, originating from
Berkeley Unix.
Unix systems up to around
Unix Version 7 only had one shell - the
Bourne shell, sh. Csh had better
interactive features, notably command input
history, allowing earlier commands to be recalled and edited (though it was still not as good as the
VMS equivalent of the time).
Presumably, csh's
C-like
syntax was intended to endear it to programmers but sadly it lacks some
sh features which are useful for writing
shell scripts so you need to know two different syntaxes for every shell construct.
A plethora of different shells followed csh, e.g.
tcsh,
ksh,
bash,
rc, but sh and csh are the only ones which are provided with most versions of Unix.
(1998-04-04)
